Quotes I Like (But Not Necessarily Agree With!)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.
-- Aristotle
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-- Paul Dirac
A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar
conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
-- Socrates
Be as you wish to seem.
-- Socrates
One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice;
and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.
-- Socrates
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people
would be contented to take their own and depart.
-- Socrates
Asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim.
-- Unknown
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We all know that art is not the truth, art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
-- Pablo Picasso
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.
-- Leo Tolstoy
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the same extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
-- H. L. Mencken
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless.
Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
-- Joan Vinge ("The Snow Queen")
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
-- Anatole France
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
-- Anatole France
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a
lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
-- Amy Bloom
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
-- Franklin P. Jones
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against
your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
-- Mary Oliver ("Blackwater Woods")
I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you
-- Roy Croft
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
-- William Shakespeare
Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
-- Gustave Flaubert
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
-- Gustave Flaubert
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
-- Bertrand Russell
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
-- Bertrand Russell
The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our
faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
-- Bertrand Russell
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
-- Bertrand Russell
The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge,
art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
-- Bertrand Russell
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
-- Bertrand Russell
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
-- Bertrand Russell [I strongly disagree; very few assholes quite suffice to prevent it]
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.
-- Bertrand Russell
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
-- Bertrand Russell
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
-- Bertrand Russell
Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
-- Bertrand Russell [I wonder how much that has changed...]
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
-- Bertrand Russell
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
-- Bertrand Russell
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
-- Bertrand Russell
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
-- Bertrand Russell
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
-- Bertrand Russell
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
-- Bertrand Russell
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
-- Bertrand Russell
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
-- Bertrand Russell
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
-- Bertrand Russell
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...
-- Richard Feynman
There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
-- Richard Feynman
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
-- Richard Feynman
No matter how much you care, some people will always be assholes.
-- unknown
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
17. You can get through anything if you stay put in today.
18. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking
legal? You know, why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away? I can't follow the logic on that one at all! Of all the things you can do, giving someone an orgasm is hardly the worst thing in the world. In the army they give you a medal for spraying napalm on people! In civilian life you go to jail for giving someone an orgasm!
-- George Carlin
The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, "You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done."
-- George Carlin
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-- George Carlin
The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.
-- George Carlin, "Napalm and Silly Putty"
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
-- Charles Baudelaire
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-- Albert Einstein
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
-- Albert Einstein
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein (when asked to describe radio)
When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.
-- Albert Einstein
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
-- Albert Einstein
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
-- Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
-- Albert Einstein
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
-- Albert Einstein
It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.
-- Albert Einstein
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
-- Albert Einstein
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
-- Albert Einstein
To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
-- Aristotle [and I always thought that it's from this other guy, what's his name, Descartes! Here:]
Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.)
-- Rene Descartes [However:]
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
-- Rene Descartes [Anyway, what Aristotle said was rather "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am" :-) And anyway:]
I think, therefore Descartes exists.
-- Saul Steinberg
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.
-- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
-- Blaise Pascal
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche [That sums up a big part of Waitzkin's book nicely...]
One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Woman was God's second mistake.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
-- Irwin Corey
An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
-- Laurence J. Peter
There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.
-- Laurence J. Peter
There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.
-- Laurence J. Peter
You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.
-- Laurence J. Peter
Not to unlearn what you have learned is the most necessary kind of learning.
-- Antisthenes
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
-- Winston Churchill
Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
-- Winston Churchill
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
-- Winston Churchill
I am easily satisfied with the very best.
-- Winston Churchill
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
-- Winston Churchill
If you are going through hell, keep going.
-- Winston Churchill
If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
-- Winston Churchill
Mr. Attlee is a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about.
-- Winston Churchill
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. -- Winston Churchill
Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
-- Winston Churchill
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
-- Winston Churchill
There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.
-- Winston Churchill [however, now in the Internet times, I guess he would admit that the two have almost converged]
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
-- Robert Frost
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
-- Robert Frost
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
-- Robert Frost
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Compassion is the basis of all morality.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-- Oscar Wilde